Gemma Conroy in Nature:

An ideas generator powered by artificial intelligence (AI) came up with more original research ideas than did 50 scientists working independently, according to a preprint posted on arXiv this month¹.

The human and AI-generated ideas were evaluated by reviewers, who were not told who or what had created each idea. The reviewers scored AI-generated concepts as more exciting than those written by humans, although the AI’s suggestions scored slightly lower on feasibility. But scientists note the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, has limitations. It focused on one area of research and required human participants to come up with ideas on the fly, which probably hindered their ability to produce their best concepts.

There are burgeoning efforts to explore how LLMs can be used to automate research tasks, including writing papers, generating code and searching literature. But it’s been difficult to assess whether these AI tools can generate fresh research angles at a level similar to that of humans. That’s because evaluating ideas is highly subjective and requires gathering researchers who have the expertise to assess them carefully, says study co-author, Chenglei Si. “The best way for us to contextualise such capabilities is to have a head-to-head comparison,” says Si, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California.

More here.

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Working the Stacks

Reach up for the light cord and tug through its little knot
of resistance, and there’s Samuel Johnson,
sharing the floor with Nietzsche,
Anthony Trollope, Franz Fanon, Isbert and Edith Sitwell,
German small-print dictionaries,
black bound insurance tables,
histories of 1920 trolly companies that failed.
Even before you locate a book,
you can feel its weight
in your hands, the self-sufficiency
of 1870s geographies, the erotics
of steam engines. You’re pushing the whole language
ahead of you, leaning your shoulder
into the cart and, when that doesn’t work,
falling against it
till, just when you’re certain that it won’t budge,
it starts to roll as if it’s considered the prospects
of staying in the same spot forever
and decided, instead,
to revel in the fact that it has wheels.
Hitler rides the same cart up with Marcus Aurelius,
Big Bill Haywood, the Marquis de Sade,
and Salvador Dali. Of course
you talk to yourself, but really it’s more a hum,
the kind one keeps up
moving among bodies slumbering so deeply
they could be dead, music
that doesn’t require the mouth to open,
as the mind sings to itself
day in and day out,
working alone,
on its way to words or on its way back.

by Christopher Bursk
from The First Inhabitants of Arcadia
University of Arkansas Press, 2006

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Danny Crichton in City Journal:

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Brian J. Chen in the Boston Review:

The United States doesn’t really make chips these days, instead relying on a complex process of design, production, assembly, and testing that spans the globe. The vast majority of fabrication is done in East Asia; Taiwan, in particular, produces 41 percent of all processor chips and more than 90 percent of the most powerful chips, essential to advanced computing and AI. The supply chain’s concentration in an island nation with which China expressly seeks to “reunify” gives the whole matter unusually weighty stakes. At a White House event to get the bill past the finish line in Congress, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks put it in terms bordering on thermonuclear: “Semiconductors—it’s not an overstatement to say—are the ground zero of our tech competition with China.”

While companies like Intel and Samsung are huge beneficiaries of the CHIPS Act, everyone understands that the major coup is getting the world’s number one chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), to build its foundries on U.S. soil.

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Seán Columb in The Guardian:

It is illegal to buy or sell an organ anywhere in the world, with the exception of Iran. Nevertheless, estimates suggest that around 10% of organs for transplantation come from illegal sources. Most cases, however, go unreported, so the true number is likely to be much higher.

Several countries, including Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, the Philippines and China, have been identified as centres of organ trafficking, but the trade in organs is a transnational operation. In its 2018 Global Report for Trafficking in Persons, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime identified more than 700 cases of organ trafficking, the majority in the Middle East and north Africa. A 2021 Interpol report claimed that organ trafficking was of particular concern in north and west Africa, “where impoverished communities and displaced populations are at greater risk of exploitation”.

According to the Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation (GODT), only 10% of the global demand for transplants is met each year.

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Eileen Myles at the Paris Review:

I’ve been reading Nate Lippens for years. I think this is the third time I’ve read My Dead Book and I’m finally getting a grip on what kind of machine his writing is. I think it’s a poetic instrument and also some kind of natural phenomena. I went to Joshua Tree one night in the aughts with a gang of people to see the Perseids. I’ve been thinking about that. We had sleeping bags and some people had drinks and their drugs of choice and then we all laid down flat looking up the sky waiting for the show. There wasn’t much. Like almost nothing. There’s one. And then in maybe about seven minutes another. Then another one. And nothing for a while. Then wham and all of the sudden we were screaming, giddy as kids because we were getting inundated with meteors making the sky like this crazy vibing net and we were ancient people animals lying there looking up in naked awe. It was the best. Start to finish I think that’s what Nate Lippens has done. Let me lay it out here. My Dead Book starts off with a fairly sentimental recitation, a recollection of one of his dead friends from the past. And then another one. I mean of course I like the way he writes. It’s clean, it’s fairly direct, and conceptually I am reminded of how practical friendship is to a lost child which this narrator definitely is. If you don’t know who you are then you make yourself up with bits and pieces of your friends.

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Nahil Mohana at LitHub:

On the first day of November, I stopped writing my diary of this despicable war. Not because I was bored and desperate for it to end, nor because I was unable to preserve my memories amid all the trauma, but simply because my phone broke. I had been writing my diaries on the notepad app of my phone, when it went the way of so many things in this war—patience, hope, dreams for the future—and broke.

I am still in Gaza and haven’t yet been moved to the south, as thousands of other Gazans have been. My daughter, Habiba, and I left our place near the Al-Karamah Towers, in North Gaza City, and moved to Al Nasr Street, closer to the city centre. This was a joint decision made by the whole family, given the lack of relatives we could stay with in the south. We continue to bear the consequences of this decision, but often take pride in making it, especially when we hear about the difficult conditions of those in Rafah and elsewhere: the scarcity of basic resources, being crammed with dozens of others into a single apartment, or sometimes a garage.

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Ezra Klein in The New York Times:

Sometimes you stumble across a line in a book and think, “Yeah, that’s exactly how that feels.” I had that moment reading the introduction to Zadie Smith’s 2018 book of essays,
“Feel Free.” She’s talking about the political stakes of that period — Brexit in Britain, Donald Trump here — and the way you could feel it changing people. She writes: “Millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can’t fight fire with air. But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.”

What Smith is describing felt so familiar. I see it so often in myself and people around me. And yet you rarely hear it talked about — that moment when politics feels like it demands we put aside our internal conflict, our uncertainty, and solidify ourselves into what the cause or the moment needs us to be, as if curiosity were a luxury or a decadence suited only to peacetime.

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Nick Thompson in Vice:

South Bronx-born, but raised in Long Island, Meryl Meisler returned to New York City in 1975 and fell in love with the place. Known for her intimate and evocative photography of New York’s late-night pavements and clubs, Meisler’s immersive work captures an America unlike today. In recent years, the renowned snapper has released a string of photo books from her early days: A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick (2014), Paradise & Purgatory: SASSY ’70s Suburbia & The City (2015), and New York PARADISE LOST Bushwick Era Disco (2021). Her latest limited edition book, Street Walker, features vivid images of NYC and other US cities taken in the 70s and 80s, and will be available on a made-to-order basis from November 1st via Italian publishers Eyeshot, so preorder before September 30 or miss out forever.

VICE: Is it strange to keep revisiting your youth through these shots?
Meryl Meisler: I didn’t really look at the photographs seriously before doing the books. This time, I looked through and discovered things I never even peeked at before. It’s like New York City: You sit on the subway, you could see someone reading the Bible, the Torah, whatever, and they’re reading it again and again and again, and they’re finding new meanings. I feel like I’m looking at my work and finding new meanings. I have barely touched upon my archival work from ‘73 till now.

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Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

by Wendell Berry
from Poetic Outlaws

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Adwait Patil in the New York Times:

On Oct. 27, 2022, the photojournalist Saiyna Bashir was interviewing the musician Michael Brook in his Los Angeles studio when she learned something that prompted an urgent text to Zakir Thaver, her filmmaker colleague in Pakistan:

“New undiscovered album.”

Bashir and Thaver were producing an upcoming documentary called “Ustad” about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — the celebrated Pakistani singer who died in 1997 at age 48 — and Brook, the silver-haired musician whose ambient work has crossed paths with Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno and Michael Mann, had just revealed that he was working on an unreleased Khan song.

It was part of “Chain of Light,” an album Brook recorded with Khan at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England more than three decades ago. “Ya Gaus Ya Meeran,” the track in question, was an unreleased Khan qawwali, a song based on the devotional poetry of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam.

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Killian Fox in The Guardian:

What jumps to mind when you think about the impending AI apocalypse? If you’re partial to sci-fi movie cliches, you may envisage killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to terminate their hubristic creators. Or perhaps, a la The Matrix, you’ll go for scary machines sucking energy out of our bodies as they distract us with a simulated reality.

For Yuval Noah Harari, who has spent a lot of time worrying about AI over the past decade, the threat is less fantastical and more insidious. “In order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers,” he writes in his engrossing new book Nexus. “For thousands of years prophets, poets and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. And they won’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. They could manipulate human beings to pull the trigger.”

Language – and the human ability to spin it into vast, globe-encircling yarns – is fundamental to how the Israeli historian, now on his fourth popular science book, understands our species and its vulnerabilities.

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Joya Chatterji at Literary Hub:

How did we become ‘Indians’, ‘Pakistanis’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ after the two divisions of the subcontinent? Given that national identity was so fragile and contested before 1947, how did it become a matter so ‘natural’ after it? Or did it? Did nation-making projects succeed?

Partition is often thought of as a physical process, a massive earthquake that sent different segments of the subcontinent hurtling apart in different directions. Because India and Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) evolved differently in certain important respects, and because the chatter about these differences has been so loud, the facts of their shared predicaments in the early years of nation-building have been all but drowned out. India and Pakistan evolved similar strategies in the face of comparable challenges, albeit on different scales. Common patterns were formed and persist across South Asia, partition notwithstanding. On both sides of the Radcliffe Line, nation-building shared similar premises. It tried, but failed, to produce ersatz citizenries. It is as well that we remember this.

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Ryan Gilbey at The Current:

The Long Good Friday whisks audiences across late-1970s London, taking in everything from the Concorde landing at Heathrow Airport to the desolate undeveloped Docklands, from the chauffeur-driven cars at the Savoy Hotel to the beat-up jalopies south of the Thames. The film’s heart, though, is in the East End, and so are its roots. By 1964, when Barrie Keeffe joined the Stratford Express as a cub reporter, the area was a hotbed of organized crime. Its figureheads were the twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray, notorious gangsters who insinuated themselves into the celebrity set. Keeffe had witnessed too much of their carnage to be dazzled. At eighteen, he interviewed a man who had been nailed to a warehouse floor by the brothers over a territorial dispute: “Put it down as a do-it-yourself accident,” the man said, refusing to snitch even as he nursed his stigmata. When Keeffe came to write his first film, he put in a crucifixion scene, fittingly for a story set over Easter.

That script, which Keeffe pitched as “terrorism meets gangsterism,” pitted Harold Shand, a Krays-style East End gang lord, against the IRA.

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Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

In “Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science, asks about the relationship between human beings and nature. He starts by considering our place in the broader time line. Scientists often emphasize our belatedness: a biologist might stretch her arms wide, explain that the tip of her left middle finger represents the beginnings of planet Earth, and then say that all of human history could fit into the tip of the opposite finger. “If we stick to our species, then we do rush on in a half-dressed flurry at the very end,” Godfrey-Smith concedes. “But suppose we think of ‘us’ as life as a whole.” Earth is four and a half billion years old, and life has existed here for 3.7 billion; meanwhile, the universe is about fourteen billion years old. This means that we’ve been around for “over a quarter of the total span,” Godfrey-Smith writes. From this perspective, we’re not freshmen, but seniors.

A lot separates us from the kind of life that existed billions of years ago.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

A drug that slows aging may already be on the market.

Scientists have long been interested in metformin, a widely prescribed drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes, for its potential to delay aging. In worms, fruit flies, and rodents, the drug—on average less than a dollar per pill—shows promising anti-aging effects.

Last week, a study in Cell added to the evidence that metformin could slow the ravages of time. Scientists gave male monkeys aged the equivalent of 52 to 64 in human years a daily pill for three years and monitored their physical health and cognition. Compared to naturally aging monkeys, metformin preserved their learning and memory abilities, reduced brain shrinkage, and restored their neurons to a more youthful state. The monkeys’ “brain age” was dialed back by almost 6 years, or around 18 human years.

Metformin’s effects extended beyond the brain. The drug reduced chronic inflammation—a hallmark of aging—in multiple tissues, slowed liver aging, and boosted cellular mechanisms that protect the liver. Kidneys, lungs, and muscles were also “rescued” from age-related problems, their gene expression profiles reverting to more youthful ones. The study bridges the gap between rodents and primates. The dosages of metformin given were on par with those for diabetes management and could inform upcoming clinical trials.

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